Charmed Distribution of Kubernetes features

Kubernetes on Ubuntu gives you perfect portability of workloads across all infrastructures, from the datacentre to the public cloud. With a strong focus on AI/ML and providing a cloud-native platform for the enterprise, Ubuntu is the platform of choice for K8s.

Deep integration with infrastructure features such as LBaaS, storage, and networking means freedom and preservation of choice in infrastructure.

Cloud Native Platform

Ubuntu Kubernetes provides a well integrated, turn-key Kubernetes platform that is optimised for your cloud — private or public. It is open, extensible, and secure.

Get started now and take advantage of our rapidly growing ecosystem of technology partners like Rancher Labs, JFrog and others. Charmed Kubernetes is the best foundation for your cloud-native platform!

AI / ML and HPC Architecture

GPGPU acceleration of AI and machine learning workloads on Kubernetes requires careful configuration of the underlying hardware and host OS. Ubuntu is the leading platform for public cloud GPGPU instances and Canonical offers private cloud expertise to match.

Build a GPGPU cluster and operate Kubernetes on top for HPC and high-throughput AI / ML data science.

Ubuntu Kubernetes fits perfectly on top of OpenStack, VMware, and bare metal

There’s no doubt that Kubernetes is the new standard operational layer for every multi-cloud business. Canonical enables K8s on demand for your DevOps teams — on OpenStack, VMware, public clouds, and bare metal clusters with MAAS.

With Ubuntu Kubernetes, you can deliver ‘Containers as a Service’ across the enterprise, with Canonical‘s Distribution of Kubernetes (CDK) towhich enables each project to spin up a standardised K8s environment of arbitrary scale, on demand, with centralised operational control.

Multi-cloud workload portability thanks to Ubuntu

Deep integration with virtual substrate features such as LBaaS, storage and networking across OpenStack, VMware, AWS, GCP and Azure

Same Ubuntu OS and kernel as Google, Azure, AWS Kubernetes offerings

Support for Charmed Kubernetes as well as K8s deployed using kubeadm

Support for CNCF Kubernetes binaries

PCI device passthrough for GPGPU, FPGA and SR-IOV workloads

AI and machine learning optimisations in partnership with nVidia and Google

Flavours to match public cloud K8s on Google, Azure, and AWS

Standard upstream Kubernetes, CNCF builds available

Portfolio of third-party certified solutions for CI/CD

Day-2 operations encapsulated and included

Upgrades guaranteed between K8s releases

Security updates by Canonical just like Ubuntu

Full OCI compatibility with docker and containerd runtimes

Prometheus and ELK logging and monitoring included

Extensible, third-party ecosystem for storage and networking

In partnership with Google, Canonical delivers the perfect K8s for AI and machine learning with Kubeflow.

Networking

All containers have to communicate with all other containers without NAT

All nodes have to communicate with all containers (and vice-versa) without NAT

The IP that a container sees itself as needs to be the same IP that others see it as

Kubernetes uses Container Network Interface (CNI) as an interface between network providers and Kubernetes networking. CNI is a library definition and a set of tools, under the umbrella of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.

CNI plugins

Ubuntu Kubernetes comes pre-packaged with several tested CNI plugins like Calico and Flannel. Our distribution of Kubernetes is open and extensible — bring your favourite CNI plugin and extend it.

For assistance with your private cloud network underlay — the network that provides connectivity between your physical or virtual hosts — leverage Canonical‘s work with hyperscale public clouds such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, with deep insight into the dynamics of cloud network performance and security best practices for large-scale multi-tenanted operations.

Storage

Kubernetes comes with a powerful volume plugin system that enables many different types of storage systems to:

Automatically create storage when required.

Make storage available to containers wherever they’re scheduled.

Automatically delete the storage when no longer needed.

To improve the extensibility of the storage feature set and plugin ecosystem, Kubernetes has announced a new initiative — the Container Storage Interface (CSI) — which is currently in Beta. CSI enables storage plugins to be developed independent from the Kubernetes GitHub tree, containerized, deployed via standard Kubernetes primitives, and consumed through the Kubernetes storage primitives users know and love (PersistentVolumeClaims, PersistentVolumes, StorageClasses). The next dot release of Charmed Kubernetes will provide early access to CSI.

Logging and monitoring

Operations in highly coherent large-scale distributed clusters require a new level of operational monitoring and observability. Charmed Kubernetes provides a standardised set of open source log aggregation and systems monitoring dashboards with every cloud, using Prometheus, the Elasticsearch and Kibana stack (ELK), and Nagios.

These dashboards can be customised or integrated into existing monitoring systems at your business.

Get started with Kubernetes

Find out how Canonical enables Kubernetes on demand for your DevOps teams — on OpenStack, VMware, public clouds, and bare metal clusters.